Hereinafter, a Machine to Machine environment according to the present invention will be briefly described.
Herein, a M2M (Machine to Machine) literally refers to a communication between an electronic device (or machine) and another electronic device (or machine). As a broader definition, M2M refers to a wireless or wired communication between electronic devices, or to a communication between a user-controlled device and a machine. However, recently, M2M has generally been defined as a wireless communication between an electronic device and another electronic device without any human involvement.
When the concept of M2M communication was first adopted in the early 1990's, M2M communication was merely understood and recognized as the concept of remotely controlled communication or telematics, and the related market was also limited to such concept. However, over the past few years, M2M communication has been under development at a remarkable rate and has now evolved to a market drawing worldwide attention. Most particularly, the M2M communication has greatly influenced diverse fields including Fleet Management, remote monitoring of devices and equipments, smart meter for measuring the operation time of a construction equipment installation and for automatically measuring the usage amount of heat or electricity in an applied market related to the POS (Point of Sales) and security. The M2M communication that is to be used in the future is expected to be used and applied for a wider scope of usage in association with the conventional mobile communication and high speed wireless internet or low power communication solutions, such as Wi-Fi and Zigbee, thereby becoming the basis for expanding its market domain to the B2C (Business to Customer) market, and not being limited only to the B2B (Business to Business) market.
In the age of M2M communication, all types of machines (or devices) equipped with a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card may perform data reception and transmission, thereby being capable of being remotely controlled and managed. For example, being applied to an extended range of devices and equipments, such as cars, trucks, trains, containers, vending machines, gas tanks, and so on, the M2M communication technology may be applied to an enormous range of application.
In the related art, a user equipment was generally managed in individual units. Therefore, a one-to-one communication was generally performed between a base station and a user equipment. For example, when it is assumed that a large number of M2M devices (or machines) each performs a one-to-one communication with the base station, a network overload is expected to occur due to an excessive amount signaling that is generated between each of the M2M devices and the base station. As described above, when the M2M communication is being extended and being performed at a vast range, an overhead occurring during the communication between the M2M devices or between the each of the M2M devices and the base station may become a problem.
Also, as the usage of the M2M devices is becoming more active, an environment having the general user equipments co-exist with the M2M devices may be configured. Therefore, when the conventional communication is used without any modification, a problem may occur in that the user equipment is be required to decode all of the messages respective to the M2M devices.
For example, if broadcast data or multicast data are transmitted from the base station as one-to-many messages, without any distinction between the M2M devices and the general user equipment, the general user equipment and the M2M devices are required to decode all of the broadcast data. Therefore, the power consumption level may be increased abruptly. Furthermore, the user equipment or each of the M2M devices may fail to receive the data, which the corresponding user equipment or the corresponding M2M device was initially intended to receive.
Additionally, since the MAC control messages, which are being transmitted with respect to the M2M devices, are transmitted in a broadcast format, even when a transmitted MAC control message (e.g., MOB-MTE-IND, MGMC) does not correspond to a message respective to a M2M group, to which the corresponding M2M device belongs, the M2M device may first decode a burst respective to the MOB-MTE-IND message. Then, after verifying (or determining) an M2MCID included in the MAC control message, the M2M device is required to perform a process of verifying (or determining) whether or not the corresponding M2M device group is the M2M device group, to which the corresponding M2M device belongs.
In this case, at the point when the base station is to transmit the MAC control messages, when the corresponding messages include only the information respective to a single M2M group, other M2M devices that do not belong to the corresponding group and other general user equipment may have to receive unnecessary MAC control messages.